Falsifying (Music) Education: Surrealism and Curriculum

Saville Kushner

Abstract

This article looks at what we would be unlikely to achieve in schooling - a vision of curriculum that is unreasonable, disreputable and possibly infeasible. I will talk about a surrealist approach to curriculum and the contribution of this system of thought and action to democratic education. My purpose is not the deliberate engagement with futility - rather, it is to identify the limits of educational ambition, perhaps to understand something of what schooling is by seeing what it is rarely allowed to be (though might be). Schooling, that is, as the context for music education. Having said that, I hold out a glimmer of hope that what I will present may, in some ‘hole-in-the-wall-gangs' of unlawful arts educators and music teachers, still be possible as a tendency in thought, a leaning, if not a full-blown practice. The basic premise of this paper is that, in the context of schooling, order is a deceit and that its exposure requires an iconoclasm that is embraced by curriculum.